


home is where you left it.

by milominderbinder



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Anxiety Disorder, Domestic Fluff, Living Together, M/M, Nightmares, Sleepy Cuddles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-11-21
Packaged: 2018-05-02 16:56:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5256257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milominderbinder/pseuds/milominderbinder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oliver learns some things about Connor in their first weeks of being a boring, domesticated, co-habitating couple.</p>
            </blockquote>





	home is where you left it.

**Author's Note:**

> this was mostly just an excuse to throw all my connor headcanons into one place with a bonus oliver chilling around... plus i'm really emosh about them living together and it needed to be known. how are we supposed to make it to february without these bubbas tho
> 
> written in about an hour and mostly unedited and kind of random, but i hope you guys enjoy it anyway!

_i._

Connor’s never lived with a guy before.

So he says _I’m moving in_ and it’s this big huge incredibly uncharacteristic (but secretly very characteristic, not that he’ll admit to being a big sop) romantic gesture.  So Oliver blushes and stares at him smittenly wide-eyed and then kisses the breath out of him messily and frantically with the door wide open.  Later Mrs Cho from across the hall raises a judgemental eyebrow at Oliver in the elevator and he realises they hadn’t been very subtle about that whole thing.

So that all happens and when Connor gets called away on some mysterious mission by his boss, Oliver just sits there for a while among all the boxes full of junk he didn’t even know Connor had, and smiles.

So all that’s great.

Only thing is, amongst all the romance and adorableness and overwhelmingly cute reassurance about their relationship, the two of them have overlooked one vital point.

Living together will involve actually _living together_.

Oliver has always kind of assumed Connor has never lived with someone.  As far as he knows he's Connor’s first serious boyfriend.  As far as he knows he's the first person Connor has even had sex with more than five times.  But he’s never actually known for sure until Connor starts unpacking boxes.

“I lived with a guy once before,” Oliver tells him, clearing space in a drawer.  Two years and most of a third before that had fallen apart, but more years have passed since the end of it and Oliver doesn’t even really think about James anymore.  Connor pulls that face he makes when he’s trying to act cool and emotionless but is secretly insecure and jealous as hell.

“Oh?” says Connor, as he puts a few framed pictures on the shelf by the TV.  Oliver notices one is of the two of them, together, which means Connor’s obviously printed it out and framed it and been keeping it hidden away in his apartment.  Connor is so ridiculously soppy sometimes.

“Don’t worry, it was a nightmare,” Oliver says, rolling his eyes and coming over to kiss Connor’s shoulder through his shirt.  “I’m thinking it’ll be better with you.”

“You’re damn right it will,” Connor says, and sounds pleased.  Then, in a moment of unexpected candour, he says, “I’ve lived alone since I moved off my sister’s couch at the end of freshman year.”

For a second, Oliver wonders at why Connor wouldn’t have been in a dorm, or with his mom.  But Connor’s pulling a weird blank face that means he doesn’t want to talk about it, so Oliver lets it go.

“Well,” he says, and kisses Connor’s shoulder a second time, because Connor likes when he does that. “Hopefully we won’t drive each other too crazy.”

_ii._

Connor played lacrosse in high school.  There’s one thing Oliver hadn’t known right in the first second, as Connor carries a box over the threshold with his old lacrosse stick inside it.  There’s a couple of trophies which Oliver snoops through later, and one yearbook inside the box too.  Oliver peeks in that too but unfortunately Connor was still cute in high school so there’s nothing to blackmail him with.

Oliver had known Connor had gone to boarding school, all boys, because they talked about their first times.  Oliver’s story had been much less exciting, twenty years old with a guy from his Biology lab group, but Connor had weaved this fabulously debauched tale about locker rooms and desperate horny guys and ties being used for purposes the faculty would have had a heart attack to know about.

Oliver actually learns a lot about Connor through conversations about sex.  He’s not sure if it’s because a lot of Connor’s life has revolved around sex or just because it’s the context Connor likes to talk in most.  But it’s how Oliver learns how Connor came out to his mom -- she walked in on him sucking off the next door neighbour, Cole, when he was fifteen.  It’s how Oliver learns why Connor spent most of his freshman year of college living on his sister’s couch -- because he’d gotten into a weird threesome with his roommate and it had been too awkward to stay in the dorm (though he kind of hints that there’s another reason, too, which Oliver tries to subtly bring up but never gets out).  It’s also how Oliver learns that Connor’s friend Michaela had broken up with her fiance (who Connor had slept with), that Connor has a phobia of sharing toothbrushes (a one night stand had once asked to borrow his and Connor had kicked him out) and that Connor is allergic to hazelnuts (he’d once blown a guy who ate a lot of them and ended up in hospital from contaminated come.  Which sounds fake but also horrific.  Oliver makes an immediate note to throw out his hazelnut coffee).

So yeah, Oliver knows a lot about Connor’s past sex life.  But he never knew that Connor played lacrosse.  Connor’s never expressed an iota of interest in sports, though he certainly looks in shape enough to play, and Oliver can feel a new piece of the Connor Walsh puzzle falling into place.

“I didn’t know you played lacrosse,” he says later, when Connor is home from the weird outing with his boss and they’re laying on the rug amongst piles of boxes.  Connor is kissing sloppily down Oliver’s neck and couldn’t care less what Oliver’s saying, only about getting their pants off.  Which they can’t do.  Because PrEP, and the countdown, and the fact that Oliver’s still kind of totally freaking out about his diagnosis.

“Huh?” says Connor a moment later, after he swings a leg over Oliver and ruts right down against his clothed dick, so it takes a moment for Oliver to remember as well.

“Ah -- lacrosse?” Oliver prompts, fingers pressing into Connor’s hips.  Connor just hums against Oliver’s neck, so Oliver adds, “High school?”

“Yeah,” Connor mumbles, breathless.  “Sure.  It was a great excuse to see all the hot guys showering.”

Ah.  So it did come back to sex after all.

Oliver just grins and keeps kissing.  His boyfriend is so predictable.

_iii._

Connor usually can't cook a meal to save his life, but on the weekends he's the king of sinful breakfast foods.  He’ll stack up fluffy pancakes ten high in puddles of syrup, and he makes waffles from scratch, and he churns out these smoothies which look healthy until he fills them up with freaking chocolate chips.  

He should weigh three hundred pounds, only he mostly hardly eats any of it himself.  He just watches Oliver eat with a stupid smug smile.  It's adorable.

_iv._

Connor’s a complete type A clean freak.  

It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise.  And it’s not like Oliver’s a slob or anything, in fact he’s pretty darn clean himself to any given definition of the word, but yeah, he’ll leave the dinner dishes til the morning if he’s feeling lazy, and he’ll throw his jeans over the back of the chair instead of putting them away sometimes, and he doesn’t wash his sheets until they’re dirty or vacuum more than once a week.

Connor had never seemed to mind that stuff before.  But as soon as he’s moved in Oliver finds the apartment transformed, and not just because there’s new stuff crammed onto all his shelves and into all his drawers and about twelve more throw pillows have appeared.

It’s transformed because all of a sudden their shirts are perfectly folded in the drawers.  Because the tangle of cables at Oliver’s computer station are all colour tagged and clipped out of sight behind the desk.  Because the cutlery drawer is rearranged, and the cabinets are alphabetised, and the wardrobe is sorted by colour.  Connor somehow finds spare time between his full time education and his second full time internship and his third full time hobby of being the horniest man alive and wanting sex about five times a day -- and he uses this magical extra time to vacuum four times a week.  To do the laundry every single Wednesday and Sunday.  To dust, and alphabetise the DVDs, and clean out the fridge.  To rearrange the pillows on the sofa until they’re perfectly symmetrical.

He doesn’t seem to mind when Oliver sits down and messes it all up again, so Oliver vows not to change his own habits to suit his clearly insane boyfriend.  He still leaves dishes out and throws his jeans on the chair and puts movies in the wrong boxes and lets dust gather for more than a few minutes without whipping out the vacuum.  But when he comes out for a glass of water in the middle of the night and finds Connor elbow deep in suds in the sink, bopping along to something on his headphones and looking adorably cheerful in his sweatpants, he doesn’t let himself be surprised, either.

He just kisses Connor and goes back to bed.  It doesn’t take long for Connor to follow.

“You know, you’re a slob,” Connor says, conversationally, on their sixth day of living together, when Oliver has deigned to leave his shoes by the door instead of neatly tucked next to Connor’s.  Oliver bursts out laughing.  Hard, happy snorts of laughter, as he stares disbelievingly up at Connor’s face.  Connor shifts and asks, after a moment, “What?”

“Connor,” Oliver tells him, sweetly and still laughing, “All my friends think I’m a total neat freak.  The fact that you think I’m a slob is only proving that you’re the weirdest, cleanest person in Philadelphia.  Possibly the world.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being clean,” Connor grouches, but lets Oliver pull him into a kiss on the sofa.  Tongues get involved and hands grab at hips and legs are hitched up and soft, desperate sounds are made.  

The shoes end up staying where they are.

_v._

Then there’s the nightmares.  

Even though they haven’t been having sex Connor’s stayed the night a few times since they got back together, but the nightmares never happened then.  And then all of a sudden they’re sleeping together every night, and it’s fine on the first, and it’s fine on the second, and it’s on the third that he wakes up in the middle of the night to Connor shaking and sobbing into the pillow and letting out these little groans which fucking break Oliver’s heart.

He wakes Connor up from it, but Connor’s embarrassed.  Won’t talk about it.  Just wraps himself around a pillow with his back to Oliver and shakes.

Oliver strokes his hair, because Connor doesn’t seem to want any more contact than that, and they don’t talk about it.

Oliver still kind of hopes it’ll be a one time thing.  Only two nights later it happens again.  And then three nights after that.  And on and on and on.

Oliver wonders if it might be a side effect of Connor having given up drugs, or maybe stress from school, or maybe even Connor being worried about Oliver’s diagnosis.  But somehow it feels worse than all of that.

But Connor won’t talk about it, so Oliver doesn’t push.  He’s just glad Connor won’t have to wake up from the nightmares alone anymore.

_vi._

It’s almost a week before Oliver notices Connor’s pills.

Not the PrEP.  Those Connor takes every morning, the same time Oliver takes his own medication, in some kind of twisted but cute solidarity.  A different set of pills, though, little orange bottle stacked away in the medicine cabinet, peek out at Oliver when he’s looking for a band aid.

He picks the bottle up, confused, and reads Connor’s name on it.  They look important.  Only Connor’s never mentioned any medication before.

For a moment Oliver is stuck with a jolt of icy fear in his heart, and it settles in his stomach to the tune of resignation.  He should have known.  Once an addict always an addict -- that’s what enough people have said to him.  But he was sure he’d never seen Connor high, not even after that one night of freak out, and even then --

Well, even then, Oliver had somehow always had his doubts.  Had hoped Connor was maybe exaggerating the drugs for some reason.  To get back in Oliver’s life through pity?  To cover up that he’d been freaking out over something really stupid?  Oliver had never thought it too far through, but he’d hoped, deep down, and he’d wondered.

Only these have to be proof.  Oliver takes the bottle and goes and sits on the couch and just stares at them until he hears the door opening.

“Sorry it took so long,” Connor says as he bustles through the door. “They screwed up our order but I threatened to sue and they gave us like ten extra fortune cookies.  Told you it’d come in handy dating a lawyer.”

And then he sets down the plastic bag on the table and finally looks at Oliver and his face drops when he sees the pills.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t notice just because you put them behind some band aids?” Oliver asks.  He’s surprised by how calm his own voice sounds.  Connor looks down at the floor, lips pressing together in that way he always does when he’s scared, but he shrugs and Oliver thinks he’s not taking this as seriously as he fucking should be.

“I know I should have mentioned it,” Connor says.  His voice is quiet.  But then he looks up and meets Oliver’s eye, and Oliver can feel himself being ruined all over again.  “It just never came up before.  And it’s -- it’s not really like it’s who I am.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Oliver asks, standing up and running his hands through his hair desperately.  “You’ve told me again and again that you were getting help and you think it never _came up_?  You think an addict isn’t who you are?  Connor, you're --”

“I -- wait, no,” interrupts Connor.  Oliver’s almost too far gone to listen by then but Connor dodges around the coffee table and grabs hold of Oliver’s arms, holds him there and forces him to listen.  “Oliver, they’re not anything bad.  I’ve been taking them since college.  They’re for anxiety.  I have -- I get really, really anxious, and sometimes I freak out really bad unless I take meds for it.  They’re prescribed.  By my _doctor_.  It’s okay.”

Oliver pauses for a moment.

Then he lets out a laugh.

He knows he shouldn’t, oh lord he knows he shouldn’t, Connor just told him something serious and personal and -- oh, but isn’t it funny, though.  That he’s become this person.

“Oh, god,” he says, still laughing, and pulls Connor in tight for a hug.  “I’m sorry.  Sorry.  I just really thought --”

“Yeah,” Connor mumbles, burying his face in Oliver’s shoulder til his words are almost too muffled to make out.  “You don’t need to worry about that, though.  I’m off everything that doesn’t either let me have sex with you or stop me having a breakdown.”

Oliver stops laughing at that, and hugs Connor a little tighter.

“You should tell me these things,” he whispers.  “I knew you worried too much for your own good but I didn’t know it was so bad.”

He hears a hitch in Connor’s breath, and wishes for a moment they were looking into each other’s faces.

“It’s kind of better when I’m with you,” Connor says.

And Oliver falls so hard in love again.

_vii._

Connor works way too much.

Oliver had kind of already known about his job.  He’s helped out for Annalise often enough, now, to see how much time Connor spends on her.  And he’d always known that Connor was in school as well, and Connor had seemed particularly frazzled during exam week, but he’d locked himself away in his own apartment so Oliver hadn’t really got to see it.

Now, he sees.  He more than once comes out in the middle of the night to find Connor swallowed in a sea of notes and highlighters.  He sees Connor’s textbooks, stacked all over the apartment and impossibly thick and stuffed to the brim full of colour coded post-its.  He sees that Connor studies every day before he leaves and every night when he gets back, and that he writes essays which look more like novels, and that he regularly throws out words like _torts_ and _complex strategic litigation_ and _ex turpi causa non oritur actio_.  He speaks in Latin a lot.  He doesn’t sleep nearly enough.  He seems to be largely comprised of coffee and could probably pass the bar in his sleep.

Oliver was long out of school by the time he was twenty six, and he went to a good college and he worked hard, yes, sure, but never like Connor does.  

Oliver has to admit, he’s impressed.  And it strips away a level of Connor’s smugness even more.  Connor’s probably the smartest person in any room they walk into, but he’s not coasting on that, and he’s not getting it for nothing.

Really, Oliver mostly just feels proud.

_ix._

Connor’s not a morning person.  

It’s not like Oliver relishes in the thought of getting up before the sun or anything, but when he wakes up, he’s awake, and he gets up and showers and gets dressed and makes breakfast and deals with the fact that another day has turned up and must be faced with dignity.

Connor is not like that.

Connor sets four alarms, and when the first one goes off he moans and grabs blindly at his phone, face buried in a pillow and legs kicking helplessly.  He’ll mute that alarm, and five minutes later he’ll be back fast asleep and the second one will go off and he’ll repeat the whole performance.  And then twice more.

When he finally drags himself away, he always looks bleary, pillow-creased and warm and disgruntled.  He’ll stumble on his way out of the bed and inevitably trip over something or other.  His eyes don’t work until coffee.  Which is always his next port of call, and he’ll spill water and fumble with the pot and moan and shout at Oliver about the state of the world in general until Oliver gives in and decides to make it for him.

Connor sometimes takes his coffee into the shower -- which he sets way too cold for anyone who isn’t made of particularly fragile ice to justify.  By the time he’s got a cup of caffeine and his weird arctic shower Connor usually resembles his usual perky, flirty, neurotic self.  But those first twenty minutes are like seeing someone come out of a deep hibernation, every single morning.

It’s hilarious.  Oliver starts teasing him by putting the alarm further away from the bed, or yanking all the duvets off when he’s up and dressed and Connor’s still cocooning himself up til he’s nothing but a tuft of chaotic black hair on the pillow.  Connor, of course, only sleeps in his underwear, those sinfully tiny black shorts, so he doesn’t respond well to having his warmth ripped off of him, but he’s unable to form words at that time in the morning and just blearily groans at Oliver.

After a while, Oliver starts taking pity, and puts the coffee on before he pulls off the blankets.  Couples are supposed to look after each other, after all.

_x._

Connor’s the most cuddly person in the world.

He’d never admit it.  A million years and ten million blowjobs couldn’t get him to fess up.  But Oliver’s clever, and it never escapes his notice that every time Connor’s on the couch he ends up hugging a cushion to his lap, and when Connor sleeps it’s all tangled up in the blankets with his arms wrapped around a pillow.

Eventually Connor starts sleeping all tangled around Oliver instead, his arms locked tight around Oliver’s waist and his face buried in Oliver’s neck, snuffling at the skin there.  

Oliver graciously pretends he hasn’t noticed.

_xi._

They’re sat next to each other on the couch not really doing much when Oliver’s phone buzzes.  It’s a facebook notification.   _Connor Walsh has requested to be in a relationship with you._

“Wow,” says Oliver, accepting immediately and laughing over at Connor.  “Guess we really are official.”

“God, my mom’ll probably want to meet you now,” Connor pretends to grouch, only he looks way too pleased with himself and he’s not fooling Oliver for a second.  “If she tries to message you about china patterns promise you’ll block her.”

“I promise,” Oliver says idly.  He reaches over to play with Connor’s hair, and Connor bats him away, so he hits Connor with a cushion instead.  Connor laughs, and grabs the cushion and hugs it to himself, like always.  One day Oliver’s going to point out that habit just to watch Connor blush.

“So how’re you feeling about our newly minted relationship, anyway?” Connor asks, mostly still grinning.  “Any complaints on the co-habitation front?”

Oliver looks at Connor, all pretty and perfectly coiffed and curled up on their sofa hugging a fluffy cushion and wearing Oliver’s socks, and then Oliver looks around the apartment, textbooks everywhere and waffles in the fridge and a lacrosse stick in the corner and the shelves overflowing with their joint possessions and way too neat and organised weirdly so he can never find anything anymore.

“No,” he says, kissing Connor’s shoulder and then his neck and then his cheek with a smile.  “No complaints.”

**Author's Note:**

> i can't take credit for the idea of connor sort of living with his sister in his freshman year of college because of his anxiety, but i also can't remember where i got the idea, it was a small line in a fic i read a while back but i love it and it's now basically canon in my mind
> 
> come send me coliver prompts on [tumblr](http://milominderbindered.tumblr.com) if ya like because i feel the need to spend my entire christmas break writing about these bunnies


End file.
